Qld police warn against Windows service scam

Crooks try IQ test on banana benders

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The Queensland Police Service has issued a warning against phone-scammers pretending to offer to fix viruses.

The scam, familiar to telephone owners around the world, starts with a caller trying to convince people – usually in a disastrously incomprehensible accent – that a virus has been detected on their computer.

If the victim fails the first test (hang up on telemarketers) and the second test (don’t provide personal information over the phone to unknown callers), they’ll be talked into granting remote access to their PC to the caller. Once access is gained, the user’s machine will be infected with a key logger or similar nasty.

Naturally enough, if someone’s already failed the previous IQ tests, it’s a cinch to also get them to pay a licence fee for the “fix”.

In a cute refinement of the scam, police believe the scammers may have pre-qualified their victims with a prior call pretending to be a market survey. While the information gathered in the survey seemed innocuous, it filtered out those phone numbers that hung up on the callers, or those who didn’t have computers, retaining only those whose systems suited the fraudsters.